Mana Rocks - The Bedrock of Commander

We love Commander for the massive choice of cards it offers, and for the nearly infinite number of ways you can build a deck. But no matter who your commander is or what your deck is designed to do, there is one thing that nearly every single deck in the format wants access to: mana rocks.

Commander is a format that offers access to almost all of the most powerful spells in magic, and of course, a lot of those cost a tonne of mana. Luckily, the format's high life totals compared to other forms of Magic gives players time to build their mana bases that just isn't possible in formats like Modern where you can die on turn 3 to the right Goblins draw. And what's the best way to build and fix a mana base? Sure you can run cards like Cultivate to ramp with lands, but outside of green, your best option will almost always be a good suite of artifacts that tap for mana. Luckily, the format is brimming with good options, and we've set out the best of the best here.

Our top 10 counts any non-creature artifact that taps for mana as a mana rock, which gives a whole lot of options to play with. Of course, different decks will want different effects and will be looking for different speeds of mana acceleration, so this isn't a set in stone power ranking. We've tried to balance power, cost efficiency, reliability and playability to give you the best idea of the premier rocks for you to consider. So without further ado...

Honorable Mention - Commander's Sphere

Not quite powerful enough to make our top 10, Commander's Sphere is still reliable, flexible and affordable enough to be one of the best loved and most popular mana rocks in Commander.

Commander's Sphere offers guaranteed single mana ramp and fixing which can flexibly generate any mana in your Commander's colour identity. It also has some serious additional upside in that, when the time for ramp has passed and the extra mana is no longer needed, this mana rock replaces itself at no cost by saccing to draw a card. That added flexibility is a big boost, but 3 mana remains a serious and delayed investment to generate 1 mana per turn, and it's that extra cost that just holds back Commander's Sphere from making our top 10.

10. Chromatic Lantern

Chromatic Lantern shares Commander Sphere's significant downside in that it will often be a turn 3 play, and takes 3 entire turns to pay back its mana investment. In some ways it is actually reliable, being a much worse late game draw given that it doesn't replace itself when its ramp is no longer useful.

What pushes the lantern over the top though and into our top 10 is the really incredible fixing it offers. On top of being able to tap for a single mana of any colour each turn, the lantern's static ability promises to instantly solve all of your mana colour problems for the rest of the game. Turning every land you control into a Command Tower is such a strong effect that it more than justifies that extra one mana investment over other options. This card is an absolute godsend in five colour decks, but offers good value and consistency in four and three colour decks too.

9. Fellwar Stone

This is a really interesting mana rock option that will very often work exactly as you want it to, providing cheap, flexible fixing and ramp at a low price. The disclaimer here is that there will definitely be times that this card will be incredibly frustrating too!

Fellwar Stone hits the classic "fair" 2 colorless mana rate that makes for a good, solid mana rock that can fit in any deck. The catch here is that to be at its most effective, Fellwar Stone needs a bit of help from your opponents, because it requires one of them to actually be playing the colour you want to fix for. In a four player format that focuses on multiple colour combinations, that usually won't be a problem, and you should be able to find the colour you need somewhere on the table. Bear in mind though that if you can't - which becomes more likely as players are knocked out - Fellwar stone will effectively be providing colorless ramp only, which will make it inferior to other options on this list.

It's good to know your play group well before including this in your list, but if you can rely on the right colour choices from your opponents, Fellwar Stone won't let you down.

8. Thought Vessel

Thought Vessel has a lot in common with Chromatic Lantern, despite not offering any fixing. Its cost-to-ramp ratio is fine, but the real attraction here is another powerful static ability that can be a huge benefit in the right deck.

By removing your maximum hand size and generating 1 mana a turn, Thought Vessel is effectively a Reliquary Tower in artifact form. For decks that want to draw a crazy amount of cards, Thought Vessel offering another source of limitless hand size in the 100 while also being a reliable mana rock in itself is a huge boon, and makes it a mandatory include in the right shell.

This card simultaneously solves the two key problems of turbo-draw decks - lacking hand size to accommodate the drawn cards, and lacking the mana to cast them all quickly. That package makes this the rock of choice for any player who lives to draw cards - and lets face it, there are quite a few card draw addicts out there! Worth trying out for sure with the new one-shot graveyard to hand swap effect from Strixhaven, Harness Infinity, or any other card like Peer into the Abyss that can offer you a momentarily massive hand size that would normally be sadly temporary.

7. The Ravnica Signets

Ever reliable, the Ravnica cycle of signets offer an exceptional source of both ramp and fixing that's particularly targeted at two-colour decks, exactly you'd expect from the classic guild-focused set. As always with mana rocks, their value varies depending on the deck, but that's probably more true of these than it is of any of the other rocks on this list.

The Boros Signet for example, chosen here as the poster child for the signet cycle, is one of the most useful in that it offers ramp to a colour pairing that lacks it in a way that a base green deck for example might not need. Boros also has a good suite of artifact-matters cards and commanders like Osgir, the Reconstructor that can offer additional value from the simple fact that this is an artifact. All kinds of pairings like Dimir, Rakdos, and Orzhov will benefit from the fixing and the ramp though, even where they don't run any artifact synergies.

New mana rocks are printed all the time, but it looks like being a very long time indeed before anything fully replaces these stalwarts in the decks that want them.

6. Mind Stone

It doesn't fix for you, and it doesn't offer the most dramatic ramp on this list, but Mind Stone does offer one very important thing that no other mana rock in the top 10 offers - it cheaply replaces itself when its ramping has outlived its usefulness.

Ramp is always welcome in Commander, but there does come a time for almost every deck where you just need action much more than you need a single extra mana. When that time comes, Mind Stone cashes itself in for a card at instant speed, and it crucially does it while still offering that important 2 mana initial base cost that comparable cards like Commander's Sphere from our Honorable Mentions can't quite offer.

The self-replacement effect means that Mind Stone will never be a dead draw even in the late game, where you'd curse yourself for drawing most other mana rocks. It also has some synergies with sacrifice and artifact recursion themes, all upsides that combine to make it consistently one of the most popular mana rocks in all of EDH.

5. Chrome Mox

As we head into our top five, we're starting to reach the most heavy hitting mana rocks that can offer some really explosive potential.

On first inspection, Chrome Mox doesn't actually look like a great deal at all. Even though it offers decent fixing, Imprint also creates immediate card disadvantage, to the point that playing it on turn one feels a lot like taking a mulligan. But there's a reason for that serious handicap - while all the other mana rocks we've introduced so far have cost at least two mana, Chrome Mox is completely free. When it comes to ramp, that is a huge, huge deal. Playing a turn one Chrome Mox into an immediate additional one or two mana ramp artifact or spell can catapult you into such a rapid early lead that it can be extremely difficult for your opponents to catch up while they are still building their own plodding mana-bases.

Chrome Mox will always be at its best in the fastest formats like Modern, where its card disadvantage is made a far smaller drawback by the fact that this card will so frequently win games before the loss of a single card has a chance to matter. It's still a powerhouse in Commander though, particularly for decks with fast plans, and deserves its 5th place on this list.

4. Mana Vault

Mana Vault is another card that, to the unitiated, might look pretty unnatractive . It's a mana rock that not only doesn't untap in your untap step, it actually asks you to make a net loss in mana every time you want to untap it. Oh, and if you choose not to untap it, it smacks you in the face every turn, just to rub it in that it's sat there doing absolutely nothing.

So with so many drawbacks, Mana Vault must surely offer some really massive upside right? Oh yes. Beneath all those paragraphs of pure drawback text is a single innocuous line, added almost like an afterthought - "tap to add 3 colorless mana." That, as you will have gathered from the other rocks on this list that tend to generate one mana at a time, is a massive amount of mana to inject in a single activation, especially since the first activation effectively gives the card an initial cost to cast of negative two mana!

Mana costs in Magic don't scale linearly - it is far harder to cast an 8 mana spell than it is to cast a 7 mana spell for example, and far far harder to cast a 9 mana spell than an 8 mana spell. That's why once spells start getting to 8, 9 and 10 mana, they should really be getting close to winning you the game on the spot. Mana Vault offers you the chance to cast spells on that power level frighteningly quickly. Sure you might need to pay a few life and 4 mana here or there along the way, but we promise you won't be complaining when you cast an Ulamog three turns early. Your opponents will ignore this at their peril.

3. Mana Crypt

An iconic heavy hitter among mana rocks, Mana Crypt gets our first podium finish.

While it doesn't generate quite as much raw mana as Mana Vault, Mana Crypt still generates a mighty two mana per turn despite being totally free to play. That makes this card a really scary thing to see dropped on turn one - immediately opening up three mana plays using one colored mana from your turn one land drop is no joke, and the mana advantage just keeps on rolling in turn after turn.

Best of all, Mana Crypt's downside is clearly balanced for 20 life formats - the average of 1.5 damage per turn that this will hit you for while you have it in play is pretty trivial off an EDH 40 life total. Not that it won't finish you off from time to time (best to have a plan to blow it up if all else fails!) but for the most part this thing will have boosted you into an early win before the damage ever starts to matter.

2. Arcane Signet

By no means as powerful or explosive as cards like Mana Vault or Mana Crypt, Arcane Signet earns the number two spot on our list by virtue of its sheer usefulness across pretty much every deck in the format. Sure Mana Crypt can give much more devastating starts, but it's a famously expensive card with a downside that can start to matter over long games. Arcane Signet would never hurt you like that, either in your life total or your pocket!

This is the only classic two mana rock on our list that both ramps and provides guaranteed fixing for all your colours with no downsides and no drawbacks. That's a really hard deal to argue with, and it's why this card is the second most played mana rock in EDH by quite some distance.

Arcane Signet is a "fair" card for sure, but one that really pulls its weight and overperforms given the simplicity of its design. A deserving runner up in our list.

1. Sol Ring

Could there ever be any doubt about our number one spot? A card so ubiquitous it often sparks debate about whether it is even healthy for the format, Sol Ring is the undisputed king of the mana rocks in Commander.

At time of writing, according to EDHREC, this card is found in over three quarters of eligible Commander Decks. And for a colorless artifact with no restrictions, "eligible decks" means literally every single deck. That's right - if you're not running Sol Ring in your deck, you're in a small minority of players, and that's for a very good reason.

Sol Ring has everything you could ever want in a mana rock, and will usually be the best possible card to see in your opening hand. It can be played on turn one, and then ideally used straight away to cast something else for two colorless mana - preferably another mana rock to give you somewhere in the region of five mana on turn two! It effectively costs negative one mana to cast, and nets a clean two mana every turn after that. Despite not fixing for color, meaning some of that mana will sometimes go to waste, the sheer amount of mana that it generates for its price, and its usefulness in every single deck, make it undoubtedly the one ring to rule them all.

Card Crate Blog Team

Jonathan Widnall

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May 05, 2021
Jon Widnall

Mana Rocks - The Bedrock of Commander

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